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He’s afraid. Of me. It was like a bath of ice water. “Fuck you,” Rookwood snarled, and squeezed the trigger.
The gun spoke. Chisholm moved with the inhuman speed of the damned—but not fast enough. The bullet tore into his chest, mushrooming, and a huge black blotch appeared.
The Thing’s scream shattered glass, and Rookwood fired again, hit it again. It scrabbled away, still screaming, and smashed through the ruin of the French doors, more glass shivering free.
Got him! Savage joy filled his chest. He struggled to his feet. The Thirst burned, plucked at him. Go now. Hunt him down. He’s bleeding bad.
He glanced over. Amelia King lay slumped against the wall, her glossy hair tangled and matted with bright blood. She was crumpled like a doll thrown carelessly by a child.
Go! Go and get him! He’ll go to ground, you can mark the spot and wait for dawn. Then you can put a stake through his fucking heart and cut off his head and be free.
Six months of training, three of lying in wait for just this chance. He’d just flushed the monster out of hiding, and now here he was hesitating.
Amelia King surprised him again. Her eyes opened. Her throat was smeared with blood, and she blinked, dazed.
Oh, goddammit. He bit her. I’d bet money on it. Probably not for the first time, either. But that dowel in his chest . . .
Rookwood surprised himself this time by reaching down. His hand closed around her shoulder—why had he dropped the gun? That was a fool’s move. “It’s okay.” The words cut through the Thirst. “You’re safe.”
She scrabbled back from his touch. Drywall dust puffed down, snowdust in her hair and over her blood-spattered blue T-shirt. The blood was amazingly red, and his fangs slid free. The bones in his jaw crackled as he wrestled down the Thirst.
She gulped. “Bait.” It was the voice of a child caught in a nightmare. “You used me as bait.”
“I’m sorry.” Pale words for the guilt that twisted inside his ribs, tearing at tender tissue. “Amelia—”
“Molstein’s dead.” Sense came back into her eyes. She scrabbled back even farther, pressing herself against the wall, and clapped a hand to her bleeding neck. “They killed him. Last week before I came to you. I was bait for you, too.”
“I knew that,” he heard himself say. “Don’t worry about it.” It was too much to hope for, that one betrayal would balance the other. “Just stay here. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
She closed her eyes. Her throat worked as she swallowed. He supposed they should both be grateful she was bitten and halfway there. If she’d been safe and uncontaminated, she’d be broken inside. Bleeding to death internally. As it was, her pulse was strong and she looked all right. Pale, but all right.
“You tried to stake him.” Rookwood’s fingers fell away from her shoulder. “Right?”
“Dowels from the hardware store. Didn’t work.” She coughed, a lonely, tired sound.
Get after him. If he gets to a safe place, he’ll come back tomorrow night and kill her. He rose, scooping up his gun, and she sighed.
“Good fucking deal.” His tone was harsher than it needed to be, with the Thirst burning in his throat, spreading down his chest. “Next time use hawthorn. It’s the only thing that works well enough to immobilize them. Stay here, I’ll be back.”
He reloaded as he stepped out into the night. Wet wind slapped him in the face. Chisholm’s passage was a drift of reek against the damp, and Rookwood gathered himself. The last flask of red stuff burned against his lips; he swallowed as he ran. It scorched all the way down, and the Thirst snarled. It wanted him to go back and sink his teeth in the bleeding woman, put his mark on her throat instead of the other bleeding hole of contamination.
And there were other things he thought he’d left behind wanting to be done, too. No time for them, either. But maybe . . .
He finished gulping and stuffed the flask back in his pocket. The UV was out, and the gun, and he pulled on every inch of more-than-human speed he could gather.
Out here in suburbia, there were even parks. In the city, it would have been a chase across rooftops and through alleys, dodging crowds and sliding across neon. Here there were
fences, covered swimming pools—in this wet, cold part of the country, they were ridiculous status symbols—and the freeway like a giant artery.
The reek was flagging by the time he got to the park. He had to double back twice, cutting across fences, struggling through wet underbrush, and cursing. If this were his part of city, he’d know every back alley and sight line, every potential hiding place.
As it was, he almost stepped straight across the little depression in a soccer field. The Thirst jerked him back just in time, avoiding the clawed hand that shot up out of the wet turf.
Brought to bay at last, Chisholm dropped all pretense of humanity. Gone was the smooth courtroom baritone, the neatly combed shock of glossy white hair, the waxen, charming smile. This was the Thing without its daylight mask, its canines long and razor sharp, black sludge dribbling down its chin, and the sodden rags of its expensive suit flapping as it climbed out of its death hole.
He hadn’t expected the Thing to have so much pep left. It was still bleeding heavily, the grass smoking as ichor splashed. It crouched, a glassy squeal rising from its foul, bleeding lips. The UV lashed across it, a whip of light. More thin black blood bubbled.
It hit him hard, a last desperate gambit, claws slicing in through cloth and flesh, tangling with his ribs. Agony roared through him, but he was prepared, months of fighting in dark corners and hunting around the edges boiling down to undeniable instinct that had jerked the hawthorn stake free and—
